This was probably Mizoguchi's most ambitious film up to this point in his career, the first of his period-piece epics. It is a tad more conservative in its vision of Japanese culture than his post-war masterpieces of the early 1950s, but this is pregnant with the most prominent themes from those films.
As with the later films, the sacrifices and suffering of women is focused on. Again, the protagonists, both female and male, are thrust out of the confines and comforts of traditional Japanese society and must endure the cruel freedom of life on the margins. But whereas in Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, and, to some extent, Life of Oharu, the characters never fully return to their assigned place in the social order, finding instead a divine freedom in their marginalization, here both man and woman realize their intended fate and return to the flock. The place of the male in this order is a far more attractive one, of course.
Story of the Last Chrysanthemum is aesthetically as advanced as anything that came after it by it's director. Some of the tracking shots, bringing to mind traditional Japanese scroll painting, are as beautiful as anything Mizoguchi ever devised, or would be were the print in better shape, even after its recent restoration.
As with the later films, the sacrifices and suffering of women is focused on. Again, the protagonists, both female and male, are thrust out of the confines and comforts of traditional Japanese society and must endure the cruel freedom of life on the margins. But whereas in Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, and, to some extent, Life of Oharu, the characters never fully return to their assigned place in the social order, finding instead a divine freedom in their marginalization, here both man and woman realize their intended fate and return to the flock. The place of the male in this order is a far more attractive one, of course.
Story of the Last Chrysanthemum is aesthetically as advanced as anything that came after it by it's director. Some of the tracking shots, bringing to mind traditional Japanese scroll painting, are as beautiful as anything Mizoguchi ever devised, or would be were the print in better shape, even after its recent restoration.